Marketing Automation
Automation is an essential tool for implementing effective marketing strategies, as it allows you to streamline communication processes with your audiences within a sales pipeline. According to a study by MarketingProfs, more than 90% of marketing agencies are allocating more time and budget into marketing automation.
To integrate an automation system with your marketing strategy, you must bear in mind that such automation must be destined to accelerate and improve the accuracy of the results within your sales labor. Hence the importance of good planning and proper execution.
Previous Steps
Before you start generating your automated flows for your marketing processes, you should spend a good time planning those. Marketing automation should have your customer’s sales process as its centerpiece. This means you have to plan each stage of the process, from the first contact, the nurturing phase, and the follow-up after conversion. Therefore, automation must be focused on making each stage of the process have both single objectives for each process and a joint goal for the entire sales process. Many marketers think that by simply automating the sending of bulk emails, the automation objectives have been fulfilled. Contrary, sending emails is just a small part of your automation strategy.
Build a solid strategy
A good way to create your automation strategy is by doing a thorough analysis of everything you consider should be optimized. For example, you carry out a study of your previous marketing campaigns, what went wrong with them, and how you could make it better by automating them. You should apply this study to each of the processes within your sales flow.
Once the processes to automate have been defined, you must have a well-ordered and structured list of your contact database. If it is outdated or contains many contacts with wrong or deprecated information, this will make your automation flows less accurate.
You should also take into account that depending on the type of your business and the automation software you choose, it’s probable you have to integrate more tools to your automation solution, like a CRM and/or a CMS. So you should do exhaustive planning that includes these tools.
Maropost Journey Builder
Once your strategic planning phase is complete, it’s time to get down to business and start configuring your automations by using specialized software. This time we are going to show you how you can start doing it by using Maropost.
With Maropost you can bring all your marketing campaigns to life, whether they are through email, SMS, or web content. Among its many marketing management tools, with Maropost you can create automated flows for each task within your marketing process. You create these flows through its journey builder, a versatile drag and drop tool that allows you to configure flows based on triggers and actions. All of this in just a few minutes.
Create a journey
To start using Maropost you must have an active account or request a demo through its website. You can see their price list in the following link or click on Book a Demo to request a demo and have an overview of their platform. Once inside, you must follow the following steps:
1- Go to your Maropost dashboard and click on the “AUTOMATION” Dropdown. Click on “Journey”.
2.- Click on “New Journey”.
3.- Type in a name for your journey. Then you can set an end date for it and if you want to enable it immediately, or if you want it to retrigger to run more than once. For this example we want it to enable it and don’t want it to retrigger. Click on “Create” to start building your trigger.
Use the triggers and actions
1.- You’ll be redirected to the journey builder. You can enable the drag and drop option if that makes it easier for you. Inside the builder you have all the triggers and actions to start building your automations. For this small example, we want to send an email for our new newsletter subscribers. We are going to click on the “New Subscription” trigger. We select the list we want to trigger an action when contacts subscribe to that list.
2.-We want to send a welcome email to our subscribers, but we want to wait some minutes first before they receive it. So we are going to add a delay of 2 minutes. We click on the “Delay” element and type in “2 minutes”.
3.- Then we look for the “Send Email” action. We fill out all the requested fields to send our email. You have to choose the content for the email, so you need to have that content previously created on the “Email content” section. Be sure to choose the correct list so it only send to the actual subscribers.
End your Journey
1.-Then we are going to add another delay, this time for some days, so our recent subscribed contacts receive a special gift for that subscription. We add another delay element to the screen. We set the time for the delay.
2.- Then we add another “Send Email” action. This time the subject and content for our email will be different.
3.- When your automation is ready, you can add a stop statement, to clarify when the automation must stop. We click on the “End” element and put it at the end of our automation.
That’s how you can start your marketing automation by using Journeys in Maropost. We hope this tutorial helps you improve your marketing processes, and your business goals overall. Here at DigitalME, we can help you set your Maropost’s Journeys or implement your marketing strategies through our managed services. We can give you advice, and help you implement your Maropost journeys or any kind of automation for your marketing. If you’re interested don’t hesitate to give us a call, and we’ll reach to you as soon as possible.